This is what it really is like to be a YOUNG BLACK TRANS artist/model/talent in 2022 who is actually holding people accountable in the way they treat you, and unpacking racism, sexism, and predation, in their work.
1. You are repressed
2. Preyed on
3. Silenced
4. Over Sexualized
5. Your work is imitated by established, older, white, cis artist, and others with other identities more understood and accepted by society at large than your own.
6. People tend not look past their projections of how they think you are, because you are so unique to them, and people are also often spiteful of the unique beauty and talents you possess, so you aren’t often given space and understanding to show who you really are. People act harshly off who they think you are. Or act harshly off what they thought you were communicating, rather than listen to what you were communicating in reality. Or purposely are oppositional to you and your work from a purely racist, sexist, or ageist place, likely some combination of all three.
I get seen as so young, it negatively impacts my life, and people often take my ideas and vision with less weight because of it. I have a history to current of attracting predators/predatory people who unleash their predation on me, in my work and my personal life. Being young, and seen that way, while being overly sexualized, is a prison of dehumanization. My thoughts and pain are often treated passively, people often already have an agenda and interact with me like I just came into existence to suit their interests, then are mad when I set boundaries and expectations of how I deserve to be treated.
We all grow up seeing images of girls in their late teens and 20s presented as the ideal for women. But being one myself, I can say I do not feel like a “women,” in the way media typically presents a women to feel. I do not feel any different around my sexuality, body, and maturity than I did in Highschool. But there’s an sexist expectation that is often projected onto me, being seen as an attractive, young, black, trans women with a certain aesthetic to be using my desirability in society in manipulative ways, or be very sexually available. So I have people interact with me like a young sexualized female character in misogynistic media, like I’m a porn actress, or a pretty girl added to a plot, to just be killed. Most of my reference for my lived experiences, are k-12 schooling, and even when people have the maturity from lived experience, they feel like kids forever; and that deserves to be acknowledged, and respected. We need to treat everyone with the softness you would a child. It’s disturbing that one year could mean the difference between someone trying to push for sex, or copying my work being societally deemed an obvious predator, to society feeling less of a conscious around a predatory person doing the same predatory stuff when I am of age, despite being perceived the same. I still have people seeing me as a possibly underaged black youth, in most settings young enough that it others me, and it’s something people prey on.
All humans deserve respectful, soft, understanding treatment, and to have their boundaries respected. If everyone doesn’t get it, none of us do. Most people are not conscious and participate in dehumanizing others, but still pity themselves for experiencing dehumanization, or things perceived as such. Too many are emotionally selfish, reflecting others negativity instead of subverting it so they become part of the problem.
“if there were a cure for your disability, would you take it?”
Recently I’ve been having a little bit of disability related angst. A lot of times people ask me “If there were a cure for your disability, would you do it?”
It’s true that my disability is a burden to me sometimes, but not in a way most people would think. I think people assume that I would want to be cured so that I could walk or drive or do things like that. But really the biggest hurdle to me is the social stigma surrounding disability. People only pay attention to people with disabilities if they can use them as inspiration, porn, or as cute little sidekicks to boost their ego, but as soon as they get bored they just kind of cast us aside and move on. I wish that people wouldn’t patronize me, I wish that people would be attracted to me, or not act like they deserve a special place for being attracted to me. I wish that they would take me as seriously as an adult, because I’m 24 years old and people still talk to me like I’m a small child.
It’s not so much that I want to be able-bodied, but I would kill to just have 10 minutes to not be perceived as disabled. Just 10 minutes. Because sometimes it really does wear you down and it is really upsetting. You can’t just pick and choose which parts of someone are salvageable and make a new person out of that because that’s just not how life works. My disability has influenced every other aspect of my identity. So, if you reject my disability you reject every other part of me.
I feel like the issue at the crux of that whole cure question is “Would you rather exchange your disability if you could have a wholeness of your humanity instead?” but I would counter that my disability is my humanity. Just because someone is disabled that doesn’t automatically mean that their quality of life must be inherently less than an able-bodied person. I have more strength and wisdom and experience in my pinky finger than most able-bodied people do in their entire body.
So if you wouldn’t mind please kindly take your shitty eugenics hypothetical elsewhere! My body does not need a cure. Society’s attitudes do.
Almost every day of my childhood consisted of me begging and pleading with my parents to “let me see” the computer, crawling under my dad’s feet and waiting as he banged off email after email. Other times, I was being led to the old computer at the back off the office I could use during those common days when I went to work with my mom, only to find out it had some missing plug-in I needed. Spending my days at my moms feet were my earliest memories; my body contorted and my feet brushing the glowing power strip, I learned how to feel at home in tight spaces–at the margins.
In my coming of age, identity always meant something a little different to me though. When I was little, I traversed Kiko Lake and the Haunted Woods in Neopets, playing games all day just trying to get enough coins to buy my Kacheek a neat hat. Next, it was an obsession with dress up games on RoiworldorTycoon, maybe even the Teen Titans fighting games. Then, it was pairings and analysis on hundreds of episodes of British science fiction. And now, I find myself on group chats filled with kids from camp, and kids from school, kids who find a place of affirmation on their laptops.
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Ashaonmarginality and (safe) space irl and online.
For Pride Month 2017, I asked my LGBTQIA+ instagram followers to tag photos of themselves and their partners #drawmetylerPRIDE so I could include them in a new print. It was so hard to choose, so I ended up squeezing as many people into this illustration as possible!
Half of the proceeds from each print will go to an LGBTQIA+ charity to be determined. Please let me know if you have a charity in mind! ♥
